Oracle Blog

Let's talk OPA

Tuesday Jun 23, 2015

OPA version 12 has been with us for a few months now, and our products team are continuing to work hard on adding even more exciting features to future releases. As a reminder, this is the first version of OPA that combines the previously separate Cloud and On-Premise versions of the software into one product. Version 12 can be run using:

Oracle Service Cloud - where policy models are managed by Oracle Cloud operations

Private Cloud - where policy models are managed and deployed in your own estate

Whichever option you choose, you will be able to take advantage of a host of new features, including mobile application support, a re-designed authoring environment, improved control and flexibility around screen design and integrated collaboration and source control via the OPA hub.

Oracle Consulting Services provide a range of enablement courses as part of our OPA SmartSmart Services package, including a brand new OPA v12 Accelerator programme - aimed at people who are already experienced at developing rules in previous versions of the product.

OPA v12 Accelerator - NEW!

Course duration: 2 days

Suitable for rule authors who have previously taken the foundation course for OPA version 10. Covers the following topics:

Installing OPM version 12

Upgrading existing policy models

Navigating the new OPM user interface

Working with the hub

OPA mobile

Designing an interview

Screen styling

Testing in v12

Other new features

Our existing enablement courses have also been updated to incorporate the latest features.

OPA v12 Rule Author Foundation

Course duration: 5 days

Aimed at people who are new to OPA, or existing rule authors who want to refresh their foundation knowledge as well as learning about the new features. Includes updated content and new modules around navigating the OPM user interface, multi-author collaboration via working with the hub, improved interview design, deploying policy models to mobile applications (iOS and Android), using value lists to store reference data and some additional new built in functions.

OPA v12 Rule Author Advanced

Course duration: 5 days

This course is intended for rule authors who are already proficient in the topics covered in the foundation course, and want to take their OPA knowledge to the next level. Includes updated content around the more advanced OPA rule authoring features, such as inferred entity creation, inferred relationships, cross entity reasoning and everybody's favourite - time based reasoning (TBR).

OPA v12 with BI PublisherCourse duration: 2 days

As in previous versions, OPA v12 allows you to generate documents - now referred to as 'forms' - at the end of an interview. This course takes you through the process of creating rich, dynamic forms which can include images, tables and charts.

OPA v12 Testing

Course duration: 2 days

The OPA regression suite now uses Excel spreadsheets exclusively - allowing users to replicate test data and expected outcomes quicker and more easily than within previous versions. This course takes you through the process of creating and maintaining test scripts within v12.

OPA v12 Project Manager

Course duration: 2 days

This course provides Project Managers / Team Leaders with an opportunity to explore the leading practice methods that are used to implement OPA powered systems. Topics include resourcing considerations, estimation techniques, building a project schedule, documentation standards, case studies and tips & tricks.

Assessments

Our extremely popular rule author assessments are also being refreshed, and it is now possible to take the OPA foundation or advanced rule author assessments using version 12 of the product.

Oracle Consulting Services can deliver enablement programmes either at your premises, or at any of our Oracle offices spread around the country. If required, we can tailor our courses to make them more specific to your project needs - and we can provide any equipment required (laptops with software pre-installed, iPads etc.). Do not hesitate to get in touch if you want to arrange or discuss an enablement programme, or for any further information.

HR Accelerator – The solution of choice

Oracle’s HR Accelerator is a prebuilt, easy to adapt solution for
managing legal policies based on best practices. The HR Accelerator package supports
the new Shared Parental Leave (SPL)
regime that came into force on 1st December 2014 for the UK and will apply to
babies due to be born on or after 5th April 2015.An estimated 300,000 couples in the UK will be eligible to take SPL and employers are likely to see a rapidly growing
number of queries and requests.The HR Accelerator includes a SPL self-help module (built
directly from legislation) to deflect complex queries away from the HR
department.

The HR Accelerator includes a quick start package for
implementing and adapting the prebuilt policies to specific client needs. Part
of the HR accelerator package is a number of pre-agreed consulting days which a
customer can use to adapt policies, branding and for enablement of the business
users who wish to model and adapt their own HR policies.

Oracle Policy Automation, the
underlying engine of the HR Accelerator, allows modeling, managing, testing and
automation of policies without IT involvement. Policies modeled in Oracle
Policy Automation are used to create guided interactive service dialogues to
become part of:

»Employee
facing Self Service portals

»Mobile
HCM solutions

»and
HR service center solutions

These same policies can also be included into Core HCM solutions, On-Premise and in the Cloud, for consistent policy execution across the enterprise.

Key Benefits

•Deploy and automate prebuilt HCM policies, which
can be easily adapted by business users

•All rules are modeled in OPA using business
friendly ‘natural language’ using Microsoft Word and Excel

•Rule logic, attribute naming and mapping
components are designed for business rule authors to update and extend

•Testers can test rules directly in OPA with no
previous programming skills required

•Record a complete audit trail of how decisions
are reached

•Available in the Cloud so no infrastructure
required to set-up and run

•Deploy web-based interviews directly from the
modeled processes and policies

Significant cost reduction

•Contacts per case drop from 3 to 1

•Agent training time drops from 60 days to 5

•Policy changes in days instead of months

•Appeals and error rates cut in half

Pre-built legislation and Best Practices

Currently
available are

•Maternity pay and leave calculator

•Shared Parental Leave eligibility and pay

•Paternity pay and leave

•Employee on-boarding

•Employee off-boarding

•Sick pay calculator

•Career break

•Voluntary redundancy calculations

•Change of personal details

•Change of contract details

For a full copy of the White Paper, you can download a .pdf version from here.

Wednesday Apr 29, 2015

The Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) UK Cross Government Group is celebrating its 3rd birthday this May and was formed by OPA users from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP), the Home Office and the Legal Aid Agency. The group actively demonstrates the Cabinet Office wish for greater cross departmental working by facilitating strong collaboration. The departments share learning, resources, best practice methods and delivered OPA artefacts.

OPA Product Development works with the group giving them exclusive access to new features, before general release, and incorporates their feedback into the final version as well as the future product roadmap.

The group is divided into two with both meeting separately three times a year (normally in February, June and & September).

The
OPA Executive group meets separately and discusses topics that may
relate to governance, government wide initiatives, group membership and
resourcing.

Since its
formation, the group has grown and forum meetings are now attended by a range
of other government organisations. Events are normally held in London, but site
visits have been arranged where members are given the opportunity to see new
OPA systems being modelled and to meet many more members of the onsite delivery
teams.

The group
currently has over 100 participants and is growing every year as new
departments begin their adoption of OPA. The departments share information
through the use of a free secure online workspace. The workspace provides
access to a range of resources including example rulebases, lessons learned
documentation, forum notes, presentations, action logs and other OPA related
resources that are shared.

Most member departments have also achieved OPA
Centre of Excellence status. This programme is an Oracle recognition of a
department capability, and to validate that leading practice standards are
being followed. Within this programme, the department’s rule authors are fully
enabled in OPA and provided with an industry recognized certificate that
validates their skills up to an advanced level of expertise.

The next forum events will be held on 24th (Rule
Author) & 25th (Executive) June 2015 in the Oracle London City
Office in Moorgate. The Legal Aid Agency will be chairing this event.

Oracle has just started work on a new Cloud based project to support the development of a new web site and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

OPA Training Update

Our training team has been hard at work preparing new training materials for the upcoming v12 release.

OPA Top Tips & Modelling

Sean Reardon, our longest standing OPA specialist has two sections in this months issue. Some tips on how to optimise modelling performance and how to use OPA advanced features.

OPA X-Gov Update

The OPA UK X-Gov Group is growing with new OPA CoEs announced and events being held later in the Winter.

Upgrading OPA

We have started to use the new product (internal preview release) to migrate and upgrade projects from v10 to v12. Max Hill from our team describes the steps taken so that we are ready for the big day.

Thursday Oct 10, 2013

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the UK Cross
Government Business Rules Group meeting on whether technology generally, and Oracle
Policy Automation specifically, can help improve draft policy and legislation.
I thought it might be worthwhile to share some of those thoughts here.

1. Improving the Structure
and Accuracy of the Draft Itself

Logical and Structural
Coherence

The process of transforming natural language text into OPA’s
constrained rule format involves understanding the logical structure of the
material you are working with, identifying the conclusions and conditions of
each rule, and how each of these link to other sections of the policy material.
In doing so, the process naturally highlights any logical and structural errors
and ambiguities which may not be immediately apparent to the reader. From my
experience, even well written policy and legislation usually contains a logical
error or ambiguity that requires clarification from a policy expert every 2-5
pages.

In the early days of modeling rules, we started keeping a
list of errors we found, and ended up with ~30 common legislative errors
uncovered by modeling legislation in this format. For example, if a section
mixes and/or logic, links to another section that no longer exists, or contains
a loop between sections, OPA will immediately identify this on modeling, and in
many cases insist that the error be corrected before continuing.

Many people don’t realize that the structure and principles
behind modeling rules in OPA were developed in consultation with a senior
legislative drafter to help avoid many of these logical errors. It was
important to the development team, that by allowing the rules to be modeled in
a natural language format (Microsoft Word and Excel), we did not also encourage
the rule modeler to create rules that failed to deliver clear and correct outcomes.
In other words, the design of OPA’s constrained rule format is specifically
aimed at identifying and avoiding logical and structural errors or uncertainty.

Policy Effect

Once rules have been modeled in OPA, there are a few
techniques for identifying whether the draft policy or legislation achieves the
desired policy outcome.

The OPA Debugger
allows you to run through a single scenario to see which questions are asked,
and how the outcome is determined for a single user. I’ve found that simply
running through an OPA interview quickly identifies information that is poorly
worded, unreasonable to collect from the target audience, or is simply too onerous
as a whole. An OPA interview is also useful to assess whether the policy
calculates the desired outcome for any given scenario. The decision
report is automatically generated to show the reasons for the decision, so
errors can be directly traced back to the exact section of draft policy or
legislation.

The Coverage
tools (version 10.x) allow you to check that your test cases execute every rule
in the policy model. This is particularly useful for checking that every
section of your policy or legislation has substantive effect. For example, I’ve
seen draft legislation which categorized claimants in order to apply one of
several formulas for calculating compensation, but one of the categories was
worded so broadly that another category would never be applied.

The What-If
Analysis (version 10.x) and Excel
Testing (cloud) features allow the policy modeler to create a series of
test cases to see the effect of the rules on various scenarios. The data is
entered into Excel, and the values automatically calculated by OPA appear in
Excel column(s), allowing the tester to use Excel’s charting, highlighting and
sorting capabilities to identify and analyze the effect of the policy on a
range of scenarios, including highlighting unusual outcomes/payments.

2. Improvement Through Internal Consultation/Review

While these techniques can provide some insight into the
quality of the draft itself, they are limited in their ability to assess the
overall policy impact on the draft’s target audience. The announcement earlier
this year of Oracle
In-Memory Policy Analytics, signals a significant leap in capability. The
key difference here is twofold:

1 - The analysis applies to real-world data, so
you can see the actual effect and budget outcomes of the draft policy. For
example, you could identify that changes to a disability care scheme would cost
the government an additional $1.1 million but disproportionally impact families
in a particular region.

2 – The dashboard interface
allows people unfamiliar with OPA to analyze and tweak the policy to compare
policy options without changing the rules. Policy experts, management,
committees etc within an organization could use the dashboard interface to produce
charts comparing policy options using real data and real legislative rules,
without installing or modeling in OPA themselves.

The experts within your own organization are often the key
brains that identify when the policy is likely to go awry. I’ve demoed a
prototype to a few organizations and the feedback I’ve received is that it has great
potential to improve both the quality of review and speed of the internal review
process itself.

3. Improvement Through Public Consultation

Numerous studies have looked at whether public consultation
can contribute to the quality of draft legislation in a meaningful way. Some countries
(eg Canada,
UK, US,
Australia and New
Zealand) have actively involved citizen participation in reviewing draft
policy and legislation, with varying success. With OPA, governments now have
the option to quickly and accurately expose the legislation as an interactive
questionnaire, allowing citizens or targeted interest groups to assess their
own scenarios against the draft legislation and leave their comments on the
outcome and experience. The average citizen may not have the time or
inclination to read though dense legislation to determine how the changes will
affect their circumstances, but I believe many would have the curiosity to
answer a few questions to see how they are likely to be affected by a legislative
change. An OPA interview can therefore serve to inform as well as elicit public
feedback on the draft policy itself.

Final Thoughts

So can OPA help improve draft legislation? Absolutely. It’s
not going to tell you that your draft is a masterpiece or award you a gold star
for effort, it’s not even going to look for every error you could possibly
introduce, but it is another tool in your armory for improving the policy and
laws that govern determinations, and therefore to ultimately improve your overall
customer experience.

Fiona
Guy is an expert in advanced Oracle Policy Automation rule design and
implementation topics. She has been working with the OPA product line for over 10
years, as a lead consultant and now a product manager in the OPA development
team. She is also a non-practising lawyer and lectures in Legislative Drafting
and Technology at the Australian National University.

Wednesday Sep 25, 2013

Earlier this year, Oracle announced that Oracle Policy Automation is now available as a Cloud Service. This was an important announcement—partly because it means that OPA is now readily available to a much wider range of organizations, with SaaS flexibility and with Oracle providing the required IT infrastructure—but more importantly because it enables a shift in the way large organizations write their Customer Experience strategies.

Customer Experience has become a high priority area as both public sector organizations and private companies work hard to empower citizens and customers—by alerting them to relevant programs, services or products; by enabling 24/7/365 self-service; and by offering citizens and customers the ability to switch between difference service channels, including call center, web and in-person interactions. Often Customer Experience discussions focus on the cost and resource load of handling a single interaction. For example, some organizations measure the cost of handling a call center inquiry in the range $10–30 per call, so they will focus on offering online knowledge portals to customers, and encouraging lower-cost modes of interaction such as online text-based chat or service requests.

Oracle supports just such a multi-channel service model, and we do so with full support for both SaaS (Oracle RightNow Cloud Service) and on-premises (Oracle Siebel) options—both with productized Oracle Policy Automation available.

But Oracle Policy Automation allows us to take the discussion a step further. Oracle Policy Automation offers a powerful, cost-effective and rapidly deployable way for organizations to personalize citizen and customer interactions. Personalization is an important step in delivering a next-generation Customer Experience solution. It can help organizations to respond to calls quickly, and to enable self-service.

But even more than that, Oracle Policy Automation also plays an important role in driving accuracy and consistency. Citizens, customers—even customer service representatives—can find it difficult to answer complex questions about unusual circumstances, but Oracle Policy Automation can deliver specific, generated advice that is tailored to an inquirer’s situation. This is an important step beyond presenting generalized information to citizens and customers and asking them to interpret it. As a result, Oracle Policy Automation can enhance a Customer Experience strategy by driving higher levels of citizen and customer satisfaction, while also reducing repeat contacts from citizens or customers who may otherwise have received inconsistent advice.

Oracle Policy Automation has long offered both public and private sector organizations the ability to transform complex legislation, regulations and policy into an executable format—made available as online wizards that only ask relevant questions and explain the advice they generate; or integrated with other applications to automate all manner of complex determinations and calculations. The Oracle Policy Automation Cloud Service makes this approach more readily available to a wider range of organizations, and it includes productized integration with a leading Customer Experience Platform, the Oracle RightNow Cloud Service. Oracle also continues to support OPA integration with the Siebel platform for on-premises deployments.

We have been very pleased at the level of interest that the new Oracle Policy Cloud Service is generating, including a recent report, “Oracle offers Change “On the Fly” for Human Services Policies” by Adelaide O’Brien of IDC Government Insights. We’re looking forward to discussing this new solution with you at this week's Oracle OpenWorld conference, and at numerous other conferences and events.